Asia

The ongoing and intensifying state crackdown in China, increasingly
targeting left activists and critics, is highlighted by the case of
24-year old Zhang Shujie, a supporter of the Committee for a Workers’
International (CWI).

Zhang is a socialist and advocate of independent trade unions and
workers’ rights in China. He is a contributor to the chinaworker.info
website and a supporter of the CWI, which has members and supporters in
many countries including China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Since 2009, Zhang
has been a correspondent for the chinaworker.info site and for the
bi-monthly magazine, Socialist. Both the website and the magazine are
banned in China.

CWI Chinese bi-monthly magazine, ’Socialist’.

In February 2011, Zhang became one of countless victims of the latest
wave of repression in China, driven by the Beijing dictatorship’s fear
of revolt following the fall of the dictator Mubarak in Egypt and the
explosion of revolutionary struggle across the Arab world. The plight of
left activists in China, who are increasingly targeted by the regime, is
almost never reported by the capitalist media globally, which prefers to
focus on cases involving liberals or pro-Western dissidents whose ideas
are more to their liking.

In October 2011, Zhang managed to leave China, evading his police
‘minders’ with the help of friends and comrades in the CWI and others,
in China, Hong Kong and Europe. These include parliamentarians Joe
Higgins and Paul Murphy of the Socialist Party (CWI) in Ireland, and
‘Long Hair’ Leung Kwok-hung, legislator for the LSD in Hong Kong. Had
Zhang remained in China he risked a long period of detention, with state
security agents threatening he could be charged with “divulging state
secrets” and “inciting subversion against state power”, which is
punishable by ten years imprisonment. These charges are commonly brought
against dissidents in China today. The definition of “state secrets” is
very broad, covering for example the questioning the government’s
version of the number of schoolchildren killed in the 2008 Sichuan
earthquake, to the amounts of foreign currencies held in China’s
reserves. Zhang is currently in Sweden, where his case will be discussed
at a hearing in the Swedish Riksdag (parliament), on human rights and
state repression in China, at the end of January.

How state repression works

Zhang was called to a meeting with state security agents in the city of
Chongqing on February 24, 2011. This was at the start of a large-scale
pre-emptive crackdown in China to snuff out discussion of a ‘Jasmine
Revolution’ inspired by events in the Middle East and North Africa.
Zhang was not allowed to contact a lawyer or to inform his family.
Security agents said they ‘knew everything’ about his activities and
told him he could be detained indefinitely, i.e. ‘disappeared’, unless
he gave them information about everyone he had met or been in contact
with, ‘confessed’ his links with the CWI, and agreed to ‘cooperate’ with
the security forces. Such methods are typical for the state security
forces in China.

When Zhang was first taken for interrogation he was held for 28 hours
during which time he was made to stand, deprived of his spectacles and
refused food for several hours. Despite the fact that he was never
formally charged with an offence, his computer, mobile phone and bank
documents were seized and examined for evidence. He was warned he could
face several years imprisonment for ‘contact with a banned organisation’
and for ‘crimes relating to state security’. He was told that he could
avoid this fate if he ‘cooperated’ with the security forces. With no
alternative, Zhang agreed to their demands. Unknown to police and
against their explicit instructions, he contacted CWI comrades to seek
advice and help.

In the following months the state security officers read correspondence
between Zhang and his comrades, instructing him on how to reply. They
urged him to volunteer to attend meetings in Hong Kong, which they would
pay for. They gave detailed instructions that he should photograph
meeting participants and other activists with his mobile phone and
collect personal information. While the main focus of their enquiries
was the CWI-linked group Socialist Action and mainland China CWI
supporters, the Chongqing state security department also quizzed Zhang
about this groups’ ties with other radical forces such as the League of
Social Democrats (LSD) and legislator, Leung Kwok-hung. They wanted to
know if there was a possible link-up between the CWI and Leung, whom
Zhang has met during previous visits to Hong Kong. LSD is a radical
pro-democracy group which is not connected to the CWI.

As a separate legal and juridical entity, China’s police and courts have
no writ inside Hong Kong. According to Hong Kong’s ‘Basic Law’
(mini-constitution) its citizens’ rights to political association are
legally protected and the mainland state authorities have no formal
powers to interfere with or monitor these activities.

This means that the Chongqing branch of state security instructed Zhang,
under threat of imprisonment, to engage in ‘unconstitutional’ activities
in Hong Kong. These security officials subsequently paid for Zhang’s
visit to Hong Kong to attend a CWI meeting in October 2011, and gave
instructions to collect information on political activists in the city –
including an elected member of Hong Kong’s legislature.

Zhang had no intention of carrying out the regime’s dirty work. He made
arrangements with CWI comrades and supporters to leave China, during his
visit to Hong Kong.

This case exposes the brutal and lawless methods of the Chinese
dictatorship despite its efforts to project a more sophisticated image.
Foreign governments and the multinational companies whose interests they
hold closest to heart have largely dropped any criticism of human rights
abuses and the Chinese regime’s increasingly repressive rule. Those who
have dared to challenge this repressive system and paid the price for
this deserve the support and solidarity of all left and democratic
forces.

‘Chilling’ crackdown in 2011

Today, China is experiencing the most severe police crackdown for more
than a decade, a process that Amnesty International has described as
‘chilling’. Hundreds of writers, lawyers and activists have been rounded
up and ‘disappeared’ by police. The targeting of high profile
individuals such as artist Ai Weiwei and activist lawyers such as Gao
Zhisheng, has been used to warn others and underline that nobody is
untouchable. Within this wider crackdown, the targeting of prominent
activist lawyers, those who have defended other victims of repression,
has dealt a huge blow to any suggestion of an independent legal system
emerging in China.

In the final days of 2011 several court verdicts dispelled any
suggestion of a let up in the crack down. Sichuan-based writer Chen Wei
was sentenced to nine years in prison for ‘subversive writing’ and
Guizhou-based Chen Xi was given a 10-year sentence, also for “inciting
subversion” in trials either side of Christmas Day. Another high profile
dissident, Ni Yulan is currently on trial in Beijing for “making
trouble” due to her role in defending victims of land grabs and could
also face a draconian sentence.

Last year, China’s internal security budget ballooned to 624 billion
yuan (US$95 billion), exceeding its military budget. The influence of
hard line proponents of repression within the regime has been
strengthened. With a crucial leadership and governmental succession due
to occur in 2012, and amid severe economic challenges that could trigger
social unrest, the current regime has effectively given carte blanche to
the security forces to write their own rules in subduing potential
opposition voices.

Security forces have made increasing use of forced disappearances,
secret detentions and other ‘extra legal’ measures effectively shifting
the parameters as far as China’s already limited legal rights of
expression are concerned. “Such acts are carried out in more and more
blatant ways, with officials abandoning even the pretence of obeying the
law,” noted Amnesty International in a June 2011 report.

New and more intrusive internet controls, plans for the world’s biggest
security database to boost social controls, and tough new restrictions
on ‘weibo’ micro-blogging sites, which have become a popular means of
exposing official abuses and reporting mass protests, are all part of
the same pattern of increased authoritarian controls.

Repression against chinaworker.info

Recent years have seen a marked upswing in left wing and anti-capitalist
ideas in China, similar to processes internationally, where growing
numbers of young people especially are rejecting the capitalist market
system in the light of the global financial crisis and widening
inequality. Previously, the Chinese regime did not pay much attention to
left critics, believing that liberal and ‘pro-Western’ influences
represented its biggest political threat. This began to change
decisively in and around 2008, and the state security’s monitoring and
attacks on left groups and individuals has increased significantly.

Maoists, ‘New leftists’, Trotskyists and others who stand up for
workers’ rights, especially those who advocate independent organisations
for working people, have been detained and in several cases brought to
trial for ‘inciting subversion’, ‘violating social order’, and similar
charges. Several of these cases have been reported on chinaworker.info.

Zhang Shujie’s political activity, and the activity of other CWI
supporters in China, is of a literary nature. He has written and
translated articles for the chinaworker.info website and ‘Socialist’
magazine (the magazine is circulated as an underground e-magazine inside
China with the help of many courageous individuals).

An article by Zang in ’Socialist’ magazine.

Chinaworker.info, which was set up by CWI members in 2004, has aroused
the ire of the Chinese dictatorship. The website and CWI supporters have
organised solidarity actions in several countries in support of workers’
strikes against sweatshop conditions. They have also staged protests to
publicise the cases of arrested activists. In China the supporters of
the CWI network with labour activists, migrant rights advocates, LGBT
activists and others whose beliefs and political activity force them to
cross the line into ‘illegality’ in China.

Several young workers and students with links to chinaworker.info have
been arrested over the last three years, in circumstances similar to the
case of Zhang Shujie. In 2009, a book published by chinaworker.info in
Hong Kong, dealing with the twentieth anniversary of the 1989 Beijing
massacre (‘Tiananmen – Seven Weeks that Shook the World’ ISBN
978-91-633-4709-2) was banned in China. This book was listed by the
government as one of the top five ‘illegal political books’ of the year,
alongside ‘Prisoner of the State’ the memoirs of former Communist Party
leader Zhao Ziyang. Local governments and post offices were instructed
to hunt down copies of the book. Zhang Shujie, writing anonymously, was
one of the contributors to this book.

In October 2009, CWI member Laurence Coates, a founder of the
chinaworker.info website and another of the authors of the banned
‘Tiananmen – Seven Weeks that Shook the World’, was refused entry to
China. He was accused by Chinese officials of being a “potential threat
to national security”.

No amount of repression can save a totalitarian regime once the people
lose their fear, a process that is already underway in China. With the
economy lurching towards crisis, a bursting property bubble and
unprecedented levels of debt, the misnamed ‘communist’ dictatorship has
every reason to dread the future. The intensified surveillance and
attacks on left critics – including CWI supporters – shows the powerful
potential for genuine socialist ideas in China. These ideas can be
summarised as: immediate and full democratic rights, the end of
single-party rule, free elections to a revolutionary constituent
assembly, a workers’ and poor farmers’ government, big increases in
basic wages and a maximum 8-hour working day, free public healthcare and
education, and democratic public ownership of the biggest companies and
banks.

The case of Zhang Shujie and thousands like him underlines the need to
step up the struggle against state repression in China, to demand the
release of all political prisoners and an end to police terror. To this
end, the CWI is preparing to launch a major campaign in support of
victims of persecution in China, and especially socialists like Zhang.
This campaign will include solidarity actions, appeals for donations,
and protests against the Chinese state’s repression.